Striking Gold

In yesterday's post we covered part 2 of the MultiWave story and how my experiments with higher frequencies feeding power to the connected equipment gave me breathtaking results in the top end and midrange, but lost midbass and bottom end at the same time. Truly, this was thequintessentialdouble edged sword - but I wasn't about to let it go. Since I did not have an answer to the problem and wanted badly to get this new concept of regenerated power out into the world so high-end lovers could experience what I was hearing, we released the P300 Power Plant with the ability to raise the frequency as high as 120 Hz. We let folks know it would come at a penalty of lost bottom end, but on many systems this was actually a benefit as you could dial in what worked best 1Hz at a time - until you had perfection. It took several years before the answer I was seeking could be figured out and it came from an unlikely source: a secret vault located somewhere near Chicago. In that vault worked one of our nation's best minds, that of Douglas Goldberg. Doug, a scientist at Northrup Grumman doing God knows what to save our country, spends his day locked in a vault in a secret location. I don't know what Doug does but if I found out you'd probably never hear from me again. Doug's a serious Audiophile and designed much of the original Audio Alchemy products back in the day. Over a beer at a CES I told Doug about my problem - how could I have the best of both worlds? I want the glory of the top end I got with powering the equipment at a higher frequency without sacrificing the bottom end. Could it be done? Doug pondered this for a moment and said "Yes, but I would have to run some computer simulations to figure it out." We finished our beer and I figured that'd be the last of it. A couple of months later Doug called me and said he'd done it. It was "simple" (everything's simple when you're smart). "The simplest and most effective means would be to add in a little of the higher frequency while maintaining the lower frequency, and this could be done in several ways". Doug explained. "Combine two or more frequencies together with the lower fundamental and do it at the same time which will change the basic sine wave shape and extend the peak charging time. That's one idea. You could also start with the basic wave then add a quicker one right in the middle of the first wave." The idea was, after being explained, simple. Instead of one wave it would use multiple waves - hence the name. The bass problem was solved by sticking with the fundamental 50Hz or 60Hz and then adding a little higher frequency to open up the top end and midrange. It was a brilliant solution and fortunately our engineering group had used a type of DSP to produce our sine wave and a simple programming change allowed us to try it and produce it. Today's MultiWave is actually the first suggestion Doug gave us. We add a little bit of 180Hz to the lower frequency which extends the peak charging time of the sine wave - and the rest is history.